Bloomsberry milk chocolate comes from a New Zealand company but
is a Swiss bar. It's Swiss chocolate technically. They package with their chocoscopes emergency chocolate boxes. Do you
like the chocolate republic with Doug at Doug's Republic?

For 33% cocoa content, the same as many of its higher end competitors, Bloomsberry's taste wasn't very rich.
It was more milky but in a bland, not ultra smooth, kind of way. A Swiss-made Lindt bar is cheaper and a helluva lot tastier.

Avg
price/gram: USD 0.0495

Cocoa %: 33

Size: 100g

It was bound
to happen. Humor hit the television commercial
advertising market years ago. We're more likely to
remember a commercial and, thus, the product being
advertised if we're laughing our asses off. New
Zealand-based Bloomsberry has pulled the same stunt to great
success. Although their product line isn't all
that extensive, their packaging is. They pack their
"premium milk chocolate," as they bill it, in the
chocoscopes wrapper (seen above) and a very creative Emergency
Chocolate box which makes the merchandise look like
medicine, complete with funny instructions how to apply the
said medicine to your infected areas. They utilize
catchy art work as well.

But the joke
is
suddenly on you when you buy and then taste the chocolate.
The bars aren't cheap. As of this writing, the bars
sell in Australian supermarkets for AUD 5.44 and on web
sites for USD 4.95 per bar when you buy the bars in bulk.
It's a costly bar to be sure and for that price I really
want to be sampling premium milk chocolate, not something
posing as premium milk chocolate.

Bloomsberry
has covered their asses nicely on this one. Down
Under, they proudly claim they're an indigenous company.
Elsewhere, they endlessly cite the fact the bar is Swiss
milk chocolate because the bars are manufactured in
Switzerland. Switzerland has this magic connotation in
everyone's mind as being as the land where no chocolate can
taste bad. Yes, the Swiss have a rich tradition in
chocolate making, as do the Belgians, but this does not
imply that there is a master gene in the Swiss and Belgian
genetic code that insures every citizen of these nations can
produce great chocolate. We don't even know if Bloomsberry's recipe was really concocted by a Swiss
chocolatier. If a New Zealander flew over to
Switzerland and had a Swiss factory create his chocolate,
it's just New Zealand chocolate made with Swiss labor.
Welcome to the world of marketing.

Let's not get
too caught up on the Swiss-made angle. If this
chocolate were made in Morocco, Iran, or the planet Jupiter
and tasted like this, I'd rate it the same. For
33% cocoa content, the same as many of its higher end
competitors, Bloomsberry's taste wasn't very rich. It
was more milky but in a bland, not ultra smooth, kind of
way. It took me several days to finally work my
way through this one. A luscious bar wouldn't have
lasted an hour. This bar falls into the category of
ham chocolate, ham referring to (overly) hyped artisanal
merchandise.

I wasn't
expecting much when I saw the humor gimmicks. Aussie
Dave included it in one of my chocolate parcels.and told me to keep my preconceived notions to myself until
I tried it. If anything, my preconceived biases sway toward the little
guy. I'd rather the stereotype hold true, that the
small artisan manufacturer using hopefully higher quality
ingredients produces the better quality product. In this
case, the stereotype fails to apply. A Swiss-made Lindt bar is cheaper and a helluva lot tastier.
Save your money and buy two Lindt bars on sale.

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